Recognition in an image data set, which was recorded by a multispectral camera or other appropriate sensor mechanism, plays a role in a number of applications. Some such applications are military reconnaissance, surgery, traffic monitoring or terrain monitoring in the civil context, and also speech recognition, text recognition, and facial recognition. The length of time during pattern recognition often also plays an important role in practice and a central problem of pattern recognition is that the recognition of patterns often takes too long.
For example, in the context of military reconnaissance images of terrain to be monitored are recorded by a multispectral camera, whereupon the images are examined to determine whether certain objects, like vehicles, buildings or certain equipment, are present in the terrain. A specific pattern to be recognized within a recorded image data set then corresponds to a search object at the level of image data. An image data set is recorded, for example, during an overflight of the terrain being monitored and it is desirable to quickly recognize which of the search objects are present in the terrain. However, it has been shown that evaluation of recorded image data sets takes longer than desired.
German Patent Document DE 10 2005 009 626 A1 discloses a method and camera for following target objects in which the camera has an image sensor unit to generate image data and a processing unit to process the image data sent by the image sensor unit to the processing unit. The method involves the identification of partial areas of recorded image data sets for which there is an increased probability that they contain a search pattern and to send only the partial areas from the image sensor unit to the processing unit. In this way pattern recognition runs more quickly, but pattern recognition is too slow for many applications, like real time terrain monitoring in the context of military reconnaissance.
German Patent Document DE 10 2006 060 612 A1 discloses a multispectral camera with four spectral channels with which target objects can be recorded, for example, during an overflight of the terrain being monitored and the recorded image data sets are sent to a processing unit generally stationed on the ground. Target objects with low contrast relative to the background can also be recognized on the images recorded with the known multispectral camera, for example, by using RGB images and false color images. The processing of image data sets up to recognition of target objects in this method is very time-intensive.
German Patent Document DE 199 55 919 C1 discloses a method for recognition of patterns in an image data set in which at least one partial area of the image data set is classified as relevant by means of predetermined criteria and classification images are formed from image points in the relevant partial area and specifically by means of predetermined classification rules to determine the affiliation of image areas to a predetermined pattern. The classification images belonging to a certain pattern class are then combined and, using the combined classification images, it is determined whether they correspond to the predetermined pattern, which leads to recognition of the predetermined pattern. This method also has the drawback that recognition of patterns in image data sets takes too long for many applications.
The known methods are not suitable, in particular, to check a large amount of image data sets within a very short time for the presence of a pattern. Real time monitoring of a large area, for example, with a reconnaissance aircraft, with which large numbers of images of the area are continuously recorded, and simultaneously running pattern recognition are therefore not possible by means of known methods.